A Shared Storage Workflow for Freelancers or Small Teams

What is the best pre-editing file off-load and organization workflow for video editors? There is not one model that works for everyone. One size never fits all. But I'm here to share with you my best practices, which I hope, you can use and adapt to your own purposes and with your team.

The EVO Prodigy is a NAS server, which is a networked attached storage system that will store your media and you can connect to multiple computers. It was designed by Studio Network Solutions to manage the workflow needs of TV, film, animation, commercial and broadcast video production teams.

If you've worked with DropBox or cloud storage for video, you know that you need to have a massively large internal hard-drive to make it it work with video. But EVO enables all members of your team to access the files in one place so you can edit, manage and search for your video content with ease all in once place. You can also get versions of EVO that come with 8TB, 16TB, 24TB or 32TB all with capability to RAID (make data redundant for protection, but you lose space). I have the 16TB EVO, and I raided it, so I lost about 1 drive of space, so I now have roughly 11.5TB of space. I'd recommend this size for teams 1-3 persons.

Your team or yourself can connect the EVO to your video editing computers (you can add up to 8 computers via gigabit ethernet ports) using ethernet cables. The EVO itself comes with it's own 64-bit multi-core that runs it's own project management data system called "ShareBrowser" which enables you to add searchable tags and comments to your video files (I demonstrate this in my video below!)

You can also send video assets directly to your editing software, in my case, Premiere Pro. But it also works with AVID and Final Cut Pro X.

It really just makes things convenient for teams who work in office settings and helps you turn out content faster!